Faking the Single Life

This Valentine’s Day was a bit of a struggle for my friend, Trevor Scott. An honest young man from the suburbs of Portland, he came to Rocky not only for the stellar Environmental Science program, but also to broaden his horizons and experiment with the scary world of dating. “This Valentine’s Day,” he said, “will be one for the history books. Nobody is going to stop me from having the best Valentine’s Day ever.” Now, I’ve got to hand it to Trevor; this year he actually managed to get a date! But there is one slight issue.

Trevor has never had a girlfriend before, neither has he gone on a real date (Trevor begs to differ, but this journalist doesn’t consider “crashing into this hot chick’s car and chilling for a bit while waiting for the police to show up” a legitimate date). To Trevor, Valentine’s Day had always served as a reminder of his being single. Every Valentine’s Day was the same: spending the night watching “Top Gun” to distract from the sadness, eating nothing but comfort food, and spending the following day gorging on discount candy. It got even worse at Rocky when Trevor realized that his average Valentine’s Day was the average college student’s Tuesday.

But things changed this year. Trevor found a girl, and both of them really seem to like each other. They seem to like all the same things (Star Wars fan fiction, Sour Cream and Onion Pringles, auto-tuned and remixed Weather Channel excerpts), and they get along really well. So when Trevor started planning for his Valentine’s Day date a week ago, he wanted it to be perfect. Naturally, he came to me – the most socially awkward person in our friend group second only to him – for advice. He knew nothing of the world of romance, and at least I had heard of its existence, so I tried to help him out.

The most important thing that you must do if you want a relationship to last (or end, for that matter) is to be yourself. The more honest you are upfront, the more pain you save yourself later down the line. I told Trevor that if he wanted this date to go well, he needed to be true to himself and go with what he feels comfortable with. To Trevor, that meant acting like a chronically single guy who eats and watches movies to help get over his lack of romantic relationships.

So we worked with what we had. Trevor and his date watched “Top Gun” together in the comfort of his living room. Trevor would often drown his sorrows in Nutella, and he and his date downed an entire jar (he even let her lick the spoon). Together, they ranted about the pressure that Valentine’s Day as a social construct puts on people to hold capitalistic means in a higher regard than romantic ends. They splurged on comfort food galore, she spent the night over, and the next morning, they bought all the discount candy they could comfortably afford, and are still in the process of finishing it off.

Being single on Valentine’s Day was all that Trevor ever knew, but that didn’t stop him from having an admittedly really cute date with someone who I’m sure is a very lucky girl. I hope that they spend a long, happy, single life together, because they make one helluva cute couple.